Japan's Drowning Small Businesses

By Michael Alan Hamlin, managing director of the consultancy TeamAsia. His latest book is "The New Asian Corporation: Managing for the Future in Post-Crisis Asia" (Jossey-Bass, 2000).

A s Japan enters the new millennium with increasingly grim prospects for an economic recovery, it seems only appropriate to ask why the world's second-largest economic power has so stubbornly refused to learn from its crisis and ingest the bitter medicine of reform. Why hasn't a decade-long economic malaise triggered a political...